Week 11, November 19, 2010

Week 11, November 19, 2010

The semester is slowly winding down. Aft these talks, we are more or less done with update talks of most of the groups. I am impressed with the tenacity of students in getting their projects to speed and in some cases to completion!.

This week we had update talks by Ben, Brendon and Lindsey, Nick and Ellis and Matt. Nate gave a fine presentation on his work on improving dashboard.

1) Ben Shippe has more or less completed his work on creating a server for displaying open street maps (similar to what JumpStart International does). He even had a live demo. It is extremely creditable to Ben as his server is a $60 second/third hand computer we got with very little RAM. This prevented him to cache the map tiles. He had also very little disk space to have the detailed map of the world. Ben jus showed the detailed map of UK. Ben has documented most of his porting stratgey so that his efforts could easily be documented.

2) Brendon and Linsey are moving along in their media content delivery systems. Lindsey is working on the backend data base issues where Brendon is concentrating on
the video display. They also showed a demo of their project. They are currently hosting their project in myrpi website (thanks Brian M and the rest of the Web Tech Group). They also showed off their vote and nominate social aspects of visualizing high end video. Very Good Progress by these two gentlemen.

3) Nick and Ellis have made a very good progress with their MYDoctor project. Their project started of with a goal to help single mothers (Nick and Ellis has nearly accomplished that goal) with a web site. They have extended their goals to help all patient and physicians. They are currently adapting open source software project (by some one else) in secure chatting/secure communication. Nick and Ellis showed a demo of their project and again it looks very good.

4) Matt is continuing with his open source software development efforts in the milkyway project (using BIONC). Matt's job is make the GPU work faster and reliably. Matt is doing a fantastic job of evaluating the various compiler/programming environments for various GPU. Since Milkyway is a big name project for RPI and tens of thousands of people are helping with their volunteer computing. So it is no wonder Matt is getting GPU units shipped to him overnight for their (GPU's) use in the project. Matt is testing them to utilize their computing potential.

True to the open source efforts, Nate is leading an effort to improve the dashboard. He is calling his system Observatory. Nate has already implemented some portion of it using Python, Django and JQuery. Nate is looking for volunteers to make more contributions to Observatory/Dashboard. Nate has posted his talk slides to the group.


What a pleasure for me to work such enthusiastic and creative students. I learn so much from them - their youth rubs on me - not only I become wiser, but also I feel younger!

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